


When the Dam Breaks

by wordsbysydney (sydkang)



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: And the point of salvation, Angst, Fluff, Memories, Some Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 09:18:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5661028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sydkang/pseuds/wordsbysydney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ezekiel is great at many things, but he's the best at keeping up appearances. And he's totally fine with it, even if it's getting harder and harder to do.</p><p>Because they got out, and that's what matters.</p><p>Because it's better this way, it really is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Dam Breaks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SnorkleShit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnorkleShit/gifts).



> A very belated gift for the lovely Kira
> 
> It is ever so slightly Christmas-themed. Well, there are elves.
> 
> I hope you like it!!!
> 
> (Also, I hope it's enough angst for you hahaha)

Ezekiel Jones remembered. 

Of course he did. But somewhere around the 100th time, he had decided it was better that if – and at that point it had been a very big if – they got out of there, it would be better for everyone involved if they never knew what really happened. He was fine with the fact that they had escaped unscathed. He was fine with pretending that he had too.

He let them think he forgot, that he was blissfully unaware, but he was a little quieter during missions, spent less time with the others, not wanting to slip up and say something he wasn’t supposed to know.

And for the first little while, everything was fine. The Library kept them busy enough that Ezekiel never had to think about it for too long. It was when the calm hit that the dam he had built inside himself broke. He stopped remembering and started reliving.

It started with a crack.

He grabbed a cup of coffee that was a little too hot, and ended up dropping it, his hand throbbing. A phantom pain that kept him occupied while Cassandra ran to grab paper towels and Jake got all the books to safety.

“You have got to be the clumsiest thief I know,” Jake said. “How did you ever manage to steal anything with those butterfingers?”

Ezekiel didn’t say anything, wordlessly mopping up the mess. He felt like his eyes were spinning. He tried to blink it away, trying to get his eyes to focus on something, anything.

Once that crack formed, it was impossible to stop the rest of it from crashing down on him, wave after wave. He couldn’t anticipate when the next one would hit, when he would be trapped, gasping for air, trying not to drown.

\-----

“Jones. JONES.” Ezekiel looked up to see Eve waving her hands near his face. “You with us?” She asked.

“Huh?” he replied, trying to focus. He looked at the details on Eve’s face – her left eye, her nose, her mouth. He was having trouble looking at people all at once lately, especially them.

“Okay then,” Eve said, continuing when Ezekiel didn’t respond. “Maybe you two should go ahead and search for info instead.” Jake and Cassandra nodded. Ezekiel came back just in time to see the half-confused, half-concerned look Cassandra gave him before she and Jake walked through the back door. 

What had they been talking about? Something clipping-book related he was sure, but he couldn’t piece together enough of the conversation he’d missed to make sense of it in the slightest. 

“They’re going to need help eventually. Do you think you can put whatever you have going on in that weird brain of yours on hold for a second?” Eve asked. 

She recognized something in the look Ezekiel had in his eyes at that moment, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. When he rolled his eyes dramatically, the look disappearing as if it had been a glitch in the code of Ezekiel Jones, she looked away, brows furrowed, trying to decide what it had been and where it had gone.

It wasn’t until that night that Ezekiel had any clue as to what the clipping book mission was about. He snuck into the annex after everyone else had gone to sleep. The book was open to a page filled with articles about a series of strange burglaries.

In each of the burglaries, none of the entryways were damaged or tampered with. What was even stranger was what the burglars chose to take: they took the car keys but left the car, they took all the left shoes, they took nothing but changed all the security codes in the house, the list went on.

“That’s why,” Ezekiel said to himself, recalling how Eve had said that they would need his help eventually. 

Cassandra found Ezekiel, iced coffee in hand, flipping through a book in the annex the next morning. It occurred to her that Ezekiel had been beating her to the annex a lot lately, but just as she started to wonder why, Ezekiel saw her and told her everything he’d found out about the burglaries at a speed that indicated that his current cup of coffee was not his first.

“My working theory is that it’s some kind of trickster elf or fairy or something,” Ezekiel said, talking fast enough that Cassandra was only just keeping up. “They’re stealing stuff, but it’s not stuff that has any value. It’s about the trick. Making people late for work, confusing them, chaos, you know? Little chaos, but still.” He jumped up, bolting over to the mess of research that was lying on the table in the center of the room. “Nothing we can’t handle, right? All we have to do is trap them. Or move them. Or…”

“Ezekiel!” Cassandra said, cutting him off. He looked up from his research, spotted the concern in Cassandra’s eyes, and stopped dead in his tracks. “You’re practically vibrating. How much coffee have you had? Did you not get enough sleep last night?”

“I got enough,” he replied, slowing down his speech. “Like I was saying, we need to think of a game plan to catch these annoying little elf things. And it would be better if we did it before they change into annoying big elf things, because once they’re big enough, things are going to get much more death and destruction-y, so we’ve really got to get moving.”

Ezekiel didn’t give her any time to respond, just jumped out of the room to get everyone else up and ready. It was definitely strange, but Cassandra filed it away in her brain under “to be concerned about at a later date” since, according to Ezekiel, time was of the essence.

\-----

“God I hate these things!” Eve said, trying to catch what looked like a bouncing orb of light with a butterfly net. “Jones, how many more are there?”

“Before I tell you, I’d like to state for the record that I am winning,” Ezekiel said.

“JONES,” Eve replied, loud enough that Ezekiel jumped a little.

“Uh, twelve more in your area,” Ezekiel said, stopping his own chase for a moment to check the blinking lights on his phone. “Ten in Cassandra’s, thirteen in Stone’s, and nine in mine.”

“Great,” Eve replied, as she finally captured the elf. “Eleven more to go,” she muttered.

“Still winning,” Ezekiel said before returning to the task at hand.

They made their way around the town, capturing and storing the elves in magically sealed containers, eventually meeting up in the town square.

“Did we get them all?” Jake asked, a little out of breath.

“It says that there’s one more right here, but I don’t see it,” Ezekiel said, squinting at his phone. 

“I see it,” Cassandra replied, her eyes widening. 

“Where?” Ezekiel asked looking on the ground around them.

“There,” Jake said, pointing across the town square where a much larger elf was stomping its way toward them. “And it doesn't look too happy with us.”

“That is one gigantic elf,” Eve said, corralling them all away from the large creature into an alley. While they all caught their breath, Eve took out her phone, calling the annex. “Jenkins, quick question.”

“That’s never good,” Jenkins replied.

“Is it possible for us to turn a little elf that’s turned into a gigantic elf back into a little elf?” she asked, looking around the corner where they were hidden at the town square where the elf was happily smashing cobblestones.

“Well…” Jenkins replied.

“Oh, that’s never good,” Eve said.

“Once an elf evolves, it is very difficult to return them to their former state.”

“Difficult, but not impossible?” Eve asked.

“Theoretically, it is possible to trick the elf into voluntarily returning to its former state,” Jenkins explained. “Create a situation in which the elf cannot succeed in obtaining its goal or the object it desires by remaining, as you so aptly put it, gigantic.”

“Trick it,” Eve replied. “Alright, we can do that.” She hung up the phone before adding “hopefully” to the end of her sentence. “Okay, here’s the plan, we need to split up. Get into hard to reach places and hopefully the elf will decide that it needs to be tiny and fast to catch all of us.”

“So we’re gonna play cat-and-mouse with an angry elf?” Jake hissed through gritted teeth.

“That’s the plan,” Eve replied, running back towards the town square.

They all followed after her, executing the plan in a way that only four people who had worked through many hard-to-get-out-of situations together could. They anticipated each other’s movements in ways that only highly trained teams that had worked together for years and years did. That’s when it hit him. That’s when Ezekiel Jones realized that they remembered too.

No, not in the way that he did. They didn’t have their memories exactly, but some part of them remembered all the forgotten times they had worked together in that god-forsaken time loop. It was like muscle memory.

He’d never noticed it before, and he definitely hadn’t noticed it while they were trapped in the time loop, but the four of them had developed a short hand. It was why they rarely had to fully explain things to each other now. It was why trains of thought were so easily understood. 

Some part of them remembered.

This realization – the idea that Eve and Cassandra and Jake hadn’t really escaped the effects of the time loop like he thought they had – it paralyzed him. It wasn’t even until he heard a voice yelling “EZEKIEL” that he even looked up.

\-----

“So we’re gonna play cat-and-mouse with an angry elf?”

“That’s the plan.”

They all bolted, following Eve’s lead. Jake turned for a second before heading down an alley, looking for the creature they were running from. 

That’s when he saw Ezekiel standing, frozen, right in the middle of the square, the gigantic elf getting dangerously close to him.

Jake’s brain shut down for a second, and he shouted the first thing that came to mind.

\-----

“What were you thinking?”

They were the first words that he heard when he came to in the town square before they returned to the annex. It was the first time that Jake had said those words to him in that way, laced with concern and something akin to affection, outside the time loop.

It all made sense now. Jake had gone from saying “that was kind of brave” to getting mad at him for hurting himself. Cassandra had gone from fearing death even when she knew it wasn’t real, to facing it silently, ready for its arrival. And Eve would never have looked at him that way if she didn’t remember, on some level, what had happened. People weren’t like computers or video games. You could wipe the slate as clean as possible, and there would still be remnants left over. 

They never really escaped. They just survived.

\-----

“Has he said anything? Anything about why he froze up out there?” Eve asked Jake outside the room where Ezekiel was. 

“Nothing. He’s not even trying to act like everything’s fine anymore,” Jake replied, shaking his head.

“Okay, you’ve noticed it too, right?” Cassandra asked. “Ever since –“

“That video game thing,” Eve said, finishing Cassandra’s sentence. “Do you think –”

“He remembers,” Cassandra said, the patterns coming together in her mind. The differences in his posture, his tone of voice, his movements. They weren’t the same. Part of her couldn’t believe that it had taken her this long to realize. 

People always talked about how loved ones could be blind spots.

“Don’t push him on it,” Eve said in her ‘am I clear?’ voice. “Just give him space. He’ll talk about it when he’s ready.” 

They all agreed, knowing that she was right. They didn’t know how they knew it, but they felt the truth of her words in the dust of their lost memories.

\-----

Jake went to check on Ezekiel a little while later, despite what Eve said about giving him space. He knocked on the door and waited for a while before his worry overtook him and he went in. When he discovered the room was empty, his brain immediately started listing all the rooms and hiding places in the Library.

A second later, however, he found Ezekiel sitting on the floor in the corner, hidden from direct sight, his eyes closed. The hiding spot of a person who didn’t think anyone would come looking for him. He was sitting curled up, his arms resting on top of his knees, his head leaning on the wall behind him. To someone who didn’t know any better, he would have looked almost peaceful.

Jake Stone knew better.

He stared, completely still for a second before his legs would move. He didn’t say anything; he just sat down next to him. It felt stupid, a completely inconsequential form of comfort, but for some unknown reason, it also felt right.

Ezekiel opened his eyes and looked at him, remembering the countless times Jake had sat with him just like this. They sometimes talked, but mostly they had just looked at what was supposed to be the end, one of them hoping they would make it, the other knowing that they were about to die. 

Sitting in the corner of the Library, they looked at each other for a moment too long before looking away, neither of them wanting to say what had been unsaid for so long, neither of them thinking it was fair to bring it up. There were a million bridges that needed crossing, but that was for another day.

For now, just that moment was enough.


End file.
